On the Path

Recap: Rails Girls Washington DC

Last weekend, I had the privilege to participate in the Rails Girls Washington DC conference. Rails Girls' mission is to give women tools to build their ideas. As a majority women owned business, CodeSherpas has always been supportive of increasing diversity in the tech. We believe new perspectives and new ideas bring new and expanded opportunities. I'm happy to report that this event was a huge success. It was a gathering of bright and talented women who had wonderful ideas and lots of motivation. I mean, they were even willing to give up most of their weekend. Now that's what I call motivation! Most of the attendees had little or no prior web development experience, yet I was so impressed with how fast everyone was able to build a functional rails app and even applying a nice look and feel thanks to Bootstrap. A few attendees who did have prior development experience were able to go even faster, and I saw one person who even got so far as deploying her app to heroku. Even as a long time Rails devloper, I have to say that's not bad for a day's work!

To all the attendees, I applaud you. I know great things will come and hope this event will take you to the next level. A special thanks to organizers Liz Steininger and Brigitta Norton, I know how much work goes into an event like this, and your efforts made it smooth sailing for everyone. 

If you want to see more about the event, check out the tweets and photos.

 

RubyNation 2011 is a Wrap

It is a lot of hard work putting on a conference like RubyNation; Three CodeSherpas are on the organization committee, out of a total of 7.  I'd like to thank Gray Herter for being a driving force behind this conference... it's his baby, and without him, there would be a gaping hole in the Ruby Community in the Northern Virginia/DC Metro area.  I'd also like to thank all of our sponsors.  Without them, this conference would still just be a dream.

Every year the conference gets better and better.  With a live event, there are always issues that have to be solved in real-time (like the programs being delivered late), and each year we hold a retrospective after the conference to figure out what we need to improve.  This year it seems like it was only minor things - nothing that couldn't be handled on the spot with our great staff of volunteers.

If you attended, I'd lke to remind you to please rate the talks you attended.  Nothing helps us improve the conference like real feedback.  If you didn't attend, you missed a great event; don't miss it next year!  Make sure to visit the RubyNation website early and often.  We'll have a signup for next year's announcements available soon.

Upcoming Public Appearances

Of all the public speaking I do, the NFJS Conference Series has to be some of the most enjoyable. The venues are always nice, the crowds always intelligent and fun to interact with, and the speakers are all social and personable. Between then audiences and and other speakers, I think I learn as much as I teach at these shows. If you haven't been to one of these, you should... They are the gold standard people in the conference world judge against. I have been privileged enough to have been involved in one way or another since 2003.

This year I haven't spoken at nearly as many as I have in the past. Work and home commitments make it hard to take that many weekends. I'm happy to announce that I'll be speaking at the Greater Atlanta Software Symposium, October 23-25, and the Northern Virginia Software Symposium, Nov 6-8. Time permitting, I might be able to speak in another one this year too - we'll see.

I'll be covering some sessions on Agile Estimation Techniques, Career advice for developers promoted into management, and a couple of sessions on project-integrity tools for Java projects (like build tools, test coverage, metrics, and architectural quality).

I hope to see you there!

RubyNation This Week!

Here at the offices of CodeSherpas, we're pumped up for RubyNation this Friday and Saturday! There are so many excellent speakers, it's going to be tough deciding which sessions to attend. I'm really looking forward to Chad Fowler's talk about his recently released book, "The Passionate Programmer". Kim has started reading the book and she says, "It's full of valuable action items that will improve your career".

In the "what's new" department, I can't wait to hear from David A. Black about the changes in Ruby 1.9 as well as upcoming changes to Rails 3.0 by Yehuda Katz.

One of my favorite parts of a local conference like RubyNation is getting to hear and meet fellow Ruby enthusiasts from nearby and to hear the kinds of projects they're working on and the interesting types of problems Ruby is solving. If you don't have a ticket yet, you better get one  as there are only a few seats left.

See you at RubyNation!